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Paul Reinman was born in Germany[4] and raised in Pfiffligheim, a borough of Worms, seat of one of the oldest Ashkenazi communities. The second of five children, and the eldest son, of real-estate agent and farm-produce broker Bernhard and his wife, he began drawing at age 3. By his early twenties, he was creating pen-and-ink drawings of such subjects as the Rashi Synagogue, which was shortly afterward destroyed by the Nazis. Emigrating, he arrived in New York City on June 15, 1934, joining an aunt, Johanna, who had come to the United States circa 1890, and a cousin, Willi, who had arrived in 1927. Reinman eventually brought his younger brother Friedrich and sister Emmy in 1936; their parents and Willi’s brother Ludwig, an artist, in 1937; and his older sister Alice in March 1938. Another younger brother, Hans, remained in Germany, but eventually escaped and made his way to the U.S. in November 1945, and changed his name to John.[3]

Reinman married Dora, an immigrant from Reichelsheim, a city near Worms, in September 1938. The couple had a daughter born circa 1944.[3]

In the 1930s, Reinman entered the field of commercial art in New York, recalling in 1988,

My first job was as assistant to a designer of neon signs. Then the going got tough and I took any kind of job just to make ends meet, and I worked in the check room of an exclusive men’s club on New York's East side … but luckily I had a chance to get back to art and I took a job in a studio of a match factory. Here I did designs of match covers and lettering. A few years later I quit and started to freelance in posters, fashion drawings, and package designs. Then I brushed up on my drawing technique and practiced illustration in many mediums. I succeeded in getting assignments for dry brush drawings for pulp mags, and following this I broke into comic-book cartooning.”[3]

Also during this time, Reinman created or co-created (the writer is unknown) the superhero the Fireball in MLJ's Pep Comics #12 (Feb. 1941), the first known of many characters and stories he would draw for that company throughout the 1940s period known as the Golden Age of Comic Books. Reinman drew for such MLJ titles as Blue Ribbon Comics, Hangman Comics, Jackpot Comics, Shield-Wizard Comics, Top-Notch Comics, and Zip Comics, on such characters as the Black Hood, the Hangman, and the Wizard.[5]

Comics historian Michael J. Vassallo cites the Atlas war-comics tale "Atrocity Story" in Battlefield #2 (June 1952) as "Reinman's finest hour and ... one of the most challenging and intensely illustrated stories in the Atlas war comics line". Written by Hank Chapman,

"Atrocity Story" is not really a story at all, but rather a body of exposition in narrative form conveying information.... Chapman starts off with screaming headlines of brutal Communist atrocities done to U.S. and U.N. troops and unarmed civilians. He then draws comparisons to Nazi atrocities perpetrated by the Third Reich.... Paul Reinman renders this broadcast in newsreel fashion starting off with a magnificent full-page splash depicting a score of inhumanly bound and slaughtered U.S. Marines. The tempo picks up and using smaller and smaller panels, Reinman displays one atrocity after another. The panel-to-panel progression is swift and Reinman's art is crisp and starkly grim with dark shadowing in the inks. Page 5 is a disturbing eight-panel review of the atrocities on the Nazi concentration camps depicting dead camp victims and riveting single panels of hollow-eyed, skeletal survivors.[6]

Reinman's sister Alice and her husband Alex Leopold moved to Boca Raton, Florida, in Palm Beach County, and Reinman, following the death of wife Dora in 1967 and his leaving comics in the mid-1970s, settled nearby with his second wife, Celia.[3] There, Reinman drew courtroom sketches for television-news broadcasts, as well as movie posters and advertising art.[3] Reinman was living in Palm Beach County at the time of his death.[1][2]